University of California in Negotiations with Publisher Elsevier for Open Access to Journal Articles; Contract Cost UC $10.5 Million in 2018

The UC’s contract with Elsevier, the owner of over 2,500 journals including Cell and The Lancet, ended on Dec. 31. The UC aims to lower subscription costs and make all of its research available for free to the public in the ongoing contract negotiations.

The contract cost the UC more than $10.5 million in 2018. This is a significant portion of the UC’s approximately $40 million yearly budget for journal subscriptions, according to an email statement from Ivy Anderson, the co-chair of the UC’s Publisher Negotiation Task Force.

UC researchers additionally pay approximately $1 million per year through grants to publish in the subset of Elsevier journals that are open-access, she said. Open-access journals make articles available to the public for free, and instead charge fees to the authors to publish their research.

Gary Price (gprice@mediasourceinc.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area. Before launching INFOdocket, Price and Shirl Kennedy were the founders and senior editors at ResourceShelf and DocuTicker for 10 years. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com, and is currently a contributing editor at Search Engine Land.